Last March, Experience Hendrix had the unique opportunity to sit down with Ernie Isley from the every popular Isley Brothers to talk shop. When Sony/Legacy released the acclaimed It's Your Thing - The Story Of The Isley Brothers box set in late 1999, complete with a collection of insightful mid-1960's recordings that featured a young, and yet unknown guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix. Although the recordings themselves are not considered rare, their inclusion in this popular Isley's collection once again spurred renewed interest in Jimi's early musical roots.

While much has been said of Jimi's involvement with the likes of Little Richard, Jimi's involvement with the Isley Brothers has all been but skirted - with exception to the liner notes of 1970's release, In The Beginning (T-Neck Records), which the Isley's co-headlined with Hendrix and even prominently featured a photo of Hendrix - since they were first joined in the studio in 1965 by a very young Jimmy Hendrix. But, now 30 years later, we're pleased to offer our readers this exclusive free-spirited discussion about Jimi's relationship with the Isley Brothers as seen through the eyes of Ernie Isley.

The conversation could have taken place in any high school cafeteria or study hall during the late 60's and early 70's. Buncha guys get together and start talking music. Immediately the subject of Jimi Hendrix had to come up. Is he the greatest guitar player ever, and if you don't think so why not? So, Ernie, who do you think is the best guitarist?

"I said, 'Jose Feliciano.'" Ernie recalls some 30 years later.

"They went nuts. When they quieted down I said, 'Look. Feliciano, he's taken this song by The Doors, "Light My Fire," he's shown you how sensuous a lyric and melody it is, he's recast it from his own musical perspective. He made the song his own. He plays an acoustic guitar, not electric, and on top of everything else, he's blind. That's why I think he's the best.'

"'Okay, who do you think is better between Clapton and Hendrix?'

"And I said, 'Hendrix.'

"Everyone wants to know why.

"And I said, 'Well not for the reasons that you all say, because you hear the music in your head phones panning left to right or some reverb on a record that you bought, or a poster, or something in a magazine. It's what I've heard him play without an amp.'

"They got quiet again. Then they started talking like they hadn't said anything to me."

These memories amuse Ernie Isley for several reasons. The fifth of six boys in the Isley Family, by 1958 his older brothers Kelly, Ronny, and Rudy were pretty well known as the Isley Brothers. Even while he was in high school in Bergen County New Jersey, his brothers were enjoying their tenth year of making hits and performing live. For some of that time, circa 1965, they had this left-handed guitarist in the band. Because he had no means of getting to and from New Jersey, where the group was based, the Isleys put the guitarist up in their mother's home. Ernie Isley, twelve years old at the time, lived there too.

"He was part of the household," Ernie recalls,

How Jimi Hendrix came to live with the non-performing members of the Isley family is a simple enough story. During the 50's and 60's, the Isley Brothers were predominantly a vocal group. After a series of poorly received singles between 1956 and 1958, the three brothers signed with RCA Records. During the summer of 1959, they cut their first big hit, "Shout." In 1962, they landed their first top 40 pop record, "Twist And Shout," covered several years later by The Beatles.

As a vocal group, they had a band with which they toured and recorded. The guitarist who had worked with the Isleys during the early part of the 60's stopped working with them. The group had to find another guitarist and get him ready for their busy schedule of tours and recording dates. The task fell to older brother Kelly.

"Kelly," Ernie recalls, "was asking around, did anybody know anybody who could play. People started telling him about this guy who was better than anybody.

"'Is he better than the guy with Sam Cooke?'

"'Yes.'

"'Is he better than the guy with James Brown?'

"'Yeah.'

"'Is he better than the guy with Jackie Wilson?'

"'Yeah.'

"'Is he better than that guy we saw three years ago at three o'clock in the morning at that club in South Carolina?'

"'Yeah, he's better than him.'

"'Okay, where is he?'

"'He's in Greenwich Village. He's this left-handed guy named Jimi Hendrix. He should be easy to track down.'

"It took like all day, but he finally tracked him down, said, 'I'm Kelly Isley of the Isley Brothers. I hear you play guitar. Do you wanna play with us?'

"Jimi jumped at it. He was broke and unemployed at the time.

"'Yeah! Love to!'

"So Kelly says, 'Play something for me.'

"'I can't.'

"'Why not?'

"'Because I pawned my guitar.'

"'Okay, where is it?'

"'It's in this pawnshop, four blocks away.'

"So he and Kelly get the guitar out of the pawn shop.

"'Okay, play something for me.'

"'I can't.'

"'Why not?'

"'Because I don't have any strings.'

"So, they go to a music store and buy some strings.

"Now, Kelly can't believe that this guy has this kind of reputation and he had to pawn his instrument. Jimi begins to restring the guitar, left-handed. He gets it tuned and begins to play, it took less than three minutes and he obviously had the job. So Kelly goes, 'Great, you're hired. You played great! We have rehearsals the day after tomorrow in New Jersey. I can introduce you to the other brothers and the rest of the band.'

"Jimi says, 'I can't make rehearsals in New Jersey because I don't have a place to stay.'

"'All right. Where's all your worldly goods, everything that's yours? Is it in this room? Pack it up and you'll stay in my mother's house.'

"So he went from being broke and unemployed to staying at the home of his employer. He was one of the only musicians who enjoyed that kind of privilege. He was about 22 years old at the time and I am ten years his junior, so I was 12.

"Next thing, Kelly says, 'Jimi, now that you're going to be playing with us, man, that guitar you've got is getting kind of scruffy. That ain't gonna do. We're going to buy you a new guitar. What kind do you want?'

"'You're gonna buy me a new guitar? Can I have a white Stratocaster?'

"'Yeah.'

"So they got him a white Stratocaster, his very first one."

And that's how James Marshall Hendrix, late of Seattle, wound up staying with Mrs. Sally Isley and her two youngest sons, Ernie and Marvin, in their Bergen County home. "When he came in, Kelly kind of said, 'Mom, how are you doing? Look, this is our new guitar player we just hired. He's in the band. He's going to be staying here in the back room. Mom, this is Jimi Hendrix. Jimi, this is my mother.'

"'How are you doin', Mrs. Isley?'

"'These are my two little brothers. Ernie and Marvin.'

"'Hi.'

"'Hi.'

"He goes into the back room. Every time we had a meal, he ate. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, he was basically a member of the household. When it was time to eat, he could eat."

Mostly what he did, though was practice. He needed to learn the Isley Brothers' show, he had to learn the new songs the group was getting ready to record at a session scheduled for shortly after he joined the band. He took all his time, working out his parts, playing that new white Stratocaster without an amp.

"He played that thing all the time," Ernie recalls. "I don't remember him watching TV or reading a book or a magazine. He was just playing guitar all the time. I really didn't understand that because he was so good already."

Jimi played with the Isley Brothers for about a year, but made quite an impression in that time. It was a period where the Isley's were "between hits" having scored heavily in 1962 with "Twist and Shout." Their next hit would ironically be just after Hendrix left the band and the group signed with Motown and recorded the Holland/Dozier/Holland tune "This Old Heart of Mine."

"He went to England," Ronnie quips in the liner notes to the T-Neck album In The Beginning, which features Jimi's recordings with the Isley Brothers (see sidebar), "we went to Detroit."

Despite the dearth of hit records, however, the Isley Brothers had a well-deserved reputation for putting on a live show that took R&B over the top. Their new guitarist added yet more luster to that reputation.

"In the middle of a show," Isley remembers, "Kelly might say, 'Come on out here Jimi, and show them how it's done. Ladies and gentlemen, Jimi Hendrix.' And he'd do something like play the guitar behind his back, and everyone would go, 'My God, how did he do that?' They did a show with Eric Burdon And The Animals in 1964, and the Animals were going out of their minds."

One of the members of The Animals at that time was bassist Chas Chandler. This might have been the first time he became aware of Hendrix. Soon after that show, The Animals broke up. Chandler, sick of the playing end of the music business wanted to try his hand at the managing end. He convinced Hendrix to come to England, and the Isley's wished him bon voyage and sent him off with his now-broken-in white Stratocaster.

"We kept in touch," Ronald remarked. "Kelly kept teasing him about wanting the guitar back."

After a year in England, he came back to the New York area and dropped in on the Isleys. Chandler's instincts, of course, had been right on the money. Jimi Hendrix was the hottest thing in England at that point, winning over such contemporaries as Peter Townshend and Eric Clapton. Items about this new, phenomenal guitarist had trickled back to the states via the English music press. The Isley Brothers certainly were aware of what was going on with their old sideman.

"He had come back by the house maybe sometime in 1966," Ernie recalls. "He looked different. He had come into the house with Kelly, 'Ernie, Marvin, Jimi's killing them in England.'

"'Really? England. That's the other side of the world.'

"None of that psychedelic stuff had hit the United State's yet. It was like a year before Monterey Pop. He had a gig coming up some place in Jersey. The guys in the Isley Brothers band went there to check him out. None of my brother's went. Some time passed by, and Kelly asked them, 'I thought you guy were going to see Jimi.'

"'Oh, yeah, we went to see him last Saturday.'

"'What happened?'

"'Man, he was doing all that psychedelic stuff.'

"'Well, what did you think?'

"They got real quiet. And Kelly said, 'You know something. He blew you mothers out of the room!!' And Kelly started laughing and they started laughing. 'Yeah, he did.'"

Ernie Isley didn't pick up the guitar until around 1968, but he remembered some of the things he saw Jimi doing in the back room of his mother's house. By 1969, he was a member of the band, playing bass and guitar. In 1973, he contributed the guitar work to "That Lady" one of the group's biggest hits. With its fuzzed out sound and acerbic, bluesy lines, a lot of people who knew the history thought it was an old track with Jimi. He also got a chance to show his Hendrix chops the year of the Isley Brothers induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

"They stood all these guitarists that were there on the stage," Ernie recalled. "There was probably Keith Richards, Jimmy Page, Carlos Santana, and I was among them. Someone said, 'We're going to jam on Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze."' I looked at all these guys, and everybody looked a little intimidated, self-conscious, even a little scared. Nobody came up to the mic. So I strapped on my guitar, over my tuxedo, and I went up there and sang and played lead on it in front of all these guys. At one point, tuxedo on and all, I threw the guitar behind my back. When it was over, I'm coming off stage and Carlos Santana came over to me, shook my hand and said, 'Hey man. Nice playing.' I'm thinking, 'Boy, if the guys in study hall could see me now.'"

Among musicians, Ernie Isley's impression of Jimi Hendrix is pretty unique. For a while, he broke bread with him regularly, living under the same roof. "It's a marvelous thing to see somebody who was drinking orange juice with you or sitting at your table eating toast turning into this musical megaforce and making this contribution to the world," Ernie says. "But you see it as a kid. You see it in your house. You see something wonderful before the rest of the world sees and hears it."

Of course, for Ernie Isley, this was nothing new. He was one of the Isley Brothers, albeit one who didn't perform until the group had already been together over a dozen years. By the time he was four years old, his three older brothers had already left home to make their fortune. Around the time he started grade school, they were recording regularly.

"To hear the demo of 'Twist And Shout,' the original demo before it came out," he says wistfully. "To hear 'It's Your Thing,' in the dining room before it's recorded. That house in Englewood should be dipped in platinum. It should be a shrine to rock and roll. A lot of the Isley Brother's music, everything after 'Shout,' came out of there. 'This Old Heart Of Mine,' the first time I heard it would have been in that house, before it was out."

Jimi's presence in the house was just one more special thing about being an Isley brother. "I don't relate to that person that everybody foams at the mouth about, whose picture is 407 feet high on the side of a building. I don't know who that person is, this guitar idol. The person I relate to is the person I knew when I was 12, the guy who lived in my mother's house, and that's a totally different perspective."

For an overview of the original Isley Brothers/Jimi Hendrix recording sessions, please check out the feature IN THE STUDIO as available here at jimihendrix.com.

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